What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key.

Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine... has a good summation of this argument.

I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.

The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this.

The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we’re still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses.

Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?

Chattel slavery was a fairly unique and brutal phenomenon.

>African-Americans in particular (or non-whites in general)

Quite a lot of discrimination has happened against Hispanics, which are largely white. To say nothing of other ethic groups of whites.

That Hispanic is even brought up when discussing race shows the absurdity of most of these ideas as Hispanic isn't even a race. (Even better is the concept that there aren't races in nature, but populations, of which we artificially attempt to group based on easily identified phenotypes, but which breaks down under scrutiny.)

"The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system."

AA and meritocratic systems are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of the two is what is currently used in most college admissions processes. It is inaccurate to say that none of the people in question would be there were it not for AA.